The Grand Tour (2015)

The Grand Tour is a short film that deals with issues of memory, reconstruction and sampling media. The starting point for the film is a box of old photos of my late father’s trips to various summer language schools in Europe at the beginning of the 1960s — photographs that were taken in Berlin, Vienna, Barcelona and Tuscany. At the heart of the project lies the idea of unrecoverable loss: the loss of my father and the knowledge he possessed about what happened on these trips, as well as the loss of information that is the result of ‘poor sampling’. The box of photos goes far beyond a traditionally captured film, or even a time-lapse film in terms of its gappiness, and we might imagine that the irregular spans of time that lie between each photo are filled with whole undocumented chunks of my father’s story. Much of the film is concerned with a kind of futile attempt at reconstituting a whole from this sparse set of samples.

The film was first screened in April 2016 at the DAAD Gallery, Berlin.